From Vancouver to Pune: Paula McGlynn's Journey to Becoming a Marathi Mulgi

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this latest episode of Chasing Creativity. I am Kiran Manral. Today I have with me as my guest Paula McGlynns, who has a very interesting story indeed. How did

[00:00:24] this girl from Vancouver come all the way to India and not just settle here for the past decade but become a total Marathi Mulgi. We'll find out for Paula herself. Hi Kiran, thank you for having me.

[00:00:37] My pleasure completely. So I'm going to go straight off with the question I asked. Go for it. How did this girl from Vancouver come first to India and then decide to settle here

[00:00:47] and become more Indian than more of a Marathi girl than most of us who have been born and brought up here? Well, you're basically asking for my life story. Absolutely. In short, in short, I was studying filmmaking at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver,

[00:01:05] Canada. And there was an email that came into my inbox as I was in my last year. That said, anybody looking to do an expenses paid internship in India, you know, sending your applications.

[00:01:19] And I thought, Hey, this is my last chance to, you know, travel and be free and all before I have to be an adult. And I signed up and I got it. It was an opportunity to come and do research

[00:01:31] about the Indian film industry. And it was a three months, you know, 10 year. And after coming, I landed in Chennai, then did Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad. And in that process, I met a lot of filmmakers from the industry, whether it be directors, producers,

[00:01:52] writers, cinematographers. And the goal was to come back with a research paper about what are the differences between the Canadian and the Indian film industries, the goal of facilitating more collaboration, more co-productions, co-ventures and whatnot. But at the end of the day,

[00:02:10] I said, you know, I just fell in love with Mumbai. And I said, I want to come back and I want to stay here. I want to figure out a way to try working in this industry.

[00:02:19] And so luckily, I got another chance to do the same grant program. I came back again, did more research, did a roundtable, facilitated that with Indo-Canadian filmmakers. And at that point, I felt I had a good enough understanding of, you know, what it might take.

[00:02:34] I had a good enough network to start out. And the third trip, I came to work on a film. And I came to, you know, be just, you know, be an AD and help with the scripting of

[00:02:46] an indie film being shot in Pune. On that film, I met my co-founders of my business, Baripa right now. And together we started a production company. We, after a couple of years of struggling trying to make, you know, ad films and, you know, try and, you know,

[00:03:07] produce something that we would be excited about, we ended up finding a niche in digital brand advertising because this is the time where Twitter and, you know, all of these brands are getting their Facebook pages and they wanted viral content. All these brands wanted viral content.

[00:03:26] And after doing that for a year, TVF became big AIB. And we started thinking that, is there a way we can take our knowledge of brands and our storytelling acumen and flip that equation so that we can be more in control of the narrative. And we started this

[00:03:46] Marathi digital entertainment company called Baripa. So we were the first Marathi YouTube channel. And with Baripa, doing everything in Marathi, it's been eight years since we started Baripa now. We have three YouTube channels. We've done over eight web series, some of them on our YouTube

[00:04:05] channel with brand sponsors, some of them for OTT players like Sony Live, MX Player and others. We have jumped into Marathi standup comedy. We do merchandise. We've done tours and yeah, we're doing all kinds of stuff in Marathi now.

[00:04:26] It sounds wildly exciting. It sounds terrifically exciting because I know Marathi has such a rich history and culture of both film, literature, theatre and somehow it's not really got a platform. It's not been platform maybe because you know, Bombay is Bollywood and that overshadows everything.

[00:04:45] So it's lovely to see, you know, Marathi being put into prominence so to speak. And I've wondered now you come from a culture which is vastly different from this culture. And to create content for a culture that is so different, how did you have to

[00:05:02] learn the culture so to speak or to understand the nuances of the culture and what will work here, what will not work here and what will fly, what will land flat on its face? How did that come

[00:05:13] about? Well, I think if I had the answer to that or if anybody did, we'd all be super rich. It's all hit and miss all the time. Yeah. Ultimately, the pursuit of, you know,

[00:05:30] a good story well told is what everybody wants in terms of consuming and in terms of making. That's what everybody wants to know, the golden egg or whatever, chalice or fleece or whatever you want to call it. That's the thing we're all after.

[00:05:44] And when my partners Sarang and Anusha and I met, we had very strong, you know, naive, you may say, values that, you know, people should be happy working together. People should work fairly

[00:06:03] and be compensated fairly. And we should all be making stories which are told in the language that they're set in. So if you're setting a story in, you know, a puny college theater festival,

[00:06:17] you know, write it in Marathi. Why are you writing it in, you know, English or something like that? You know, if you want to tell a story about Koreans, you know, playing some post apocalyptic death game called Squid Games, you know, tell that story in Korean,

[00:06:34] don't do it in English. Those those are the kind of values that we stood by. And based on that, because we were seeing a lot of this happening where, you know, stories were being, especially Marathi stories, were being translated to Hindi for the hope of getting better budgets

[00:06:51] or reaching a bigger audience in the act of making something more nationally appropriate or maybe reaching out to a bigger market. You were in short diluting the essence of the characters, the style of humor, the entire geography that you're playing in becomes limited.

[00:07:10] And as soon as you do that, you kind of unroot your whole story and you make it hard to relate. I found that the, and I think a lot of people would agree, whether you're into the industry or you're not, the more local and rooted a story is,

[00:07:30] the easier it is for you to relate, even if you've not had that life experience at all. One of the most common examples I can find of this is with one of our more popular

[00:07:43] Marathi comedy sketch series we did on Baripa called Ayin Mi, which is about a mother and her two kids living in like middle class, you know, housing society in Tune. And it's so relatable for people all over the world, including myself, because at the end of the day,

[00:08:00] it's the mother and child, the dynamic, them playing within, you know, the generational boundaries because pop culture is also more global now. There's a lot of global references. And that is something which can speak across cultures as soon as you try and make something

[00:08:17] generic, you automatically make it unrelatable. So that has been our modus operandi. And then when it came down to picking stories and finding what works, as I said, I don't think anybody knows what's going to be perfect. Ultimately, when it comes to

[00:08:43] series or films, I think even YouTube videos, you have to understand the format and the mode of consumption first, and then decide, you know, if you're writing a story,

[00:08:54] stay as true to the story as you can and then see what consumption format is going to suit it best. Some stories are so character driven. It's going to take a lot of time and a lot of enjoyment

[00:09:09] for the audience is going to come out of like peeling back the layers of a character, in which case, you know, go for something series oriented. If it's heavily plot focused,

[00:09:18] maybe go for a film or a series of films, or if it's just a kiss or a joke, or, you know, just a funny thing that you heard once, maybe just stick to a sketch video.

[00:09:32] So in that sense, finding the right format works and helps a lot. And then ultimately, you have to see how do I make this make sense financially? Biggest question of them all. Yeah. How did the series, this Kranti Chanti come to you? That's one of the big ones.

[00:09:52] Yes. So we had this series called Shantit Kranti. It's on Sony Live. We've got two seasons out. And this is a series which was brought to us by the actor Abhay Mazan, very talented guy. And he's, apart from being an actor, a fantastic dancer and obviously creatively,

[00:10:16] you know, quite capable beyond that as well. He came to us with an idea that was inspired by him and his group of friends. And he really wanted to tell the story in Marathi.

[00:10:28] He had had the experience of working in TVF's show, Pictures. And so he felt at that time, this was 2014, quite some right after that first season of Pictures came out. And Bharipa hadn't done anything. Abhay approached us and said,

[00:10:46] I think this would be a really cool show idea to develop. And we had started at that time, we'd started developing some long format series and we're researching them hoping that, you know, at this time there was no Netflix, Amazon Prime, nothing had entered India yet.

[00:11:00] But we were banking on the idea that they will soon. And so we were developing shows we started writing the story. And the one liner was that these three guys who are having midlife or

[00:11:17] early midlife crises, realizing that life is not the Bollywood movie they thought it was going to turn out to be each have their own problems and to resolve it, they try to go on the typical

[00:11:30] Dil Chhata road trip to go up. And in the process of planning it, one of the guys changes his mind and he decides to take them all to a meditation retreat. Oh, nice. So after

[00:11:44] the first episode they land at the meditation retreat and it's sort of a comedy which becomes more dramatic later on as they start to first, you know, try and run away and get

[00:11:56] out of this place, which is too crazy for them. And slowly they start to meet people and have conversations and realize that the solutions that they were looking outside of themselves for were

[00:12:07] actually things that they had to come to terms with. And it was a story of growth and maturity for them, which mean their friendship. And yeah, and that was a really beautiful show which Abhay came to us with the idea Anusha Nandukumar and Sarang and this other writer,

[00:12:29] Chaitan Bangay, they wrote the first season. Sarang and I co-directed it. And the second season, Sarang and I co-wrote with Sai and Chaitan as well, a new writer, Sai Havan. And we made season two. Is season three coming? Fingers are crossed, yes. I mean we've announced it but

[00:12:52] we're not sure yet when we're going to start the shoot but it's in the works. Wonderful, wonderful. For a project like a series which goes on for season one, season two, season three,

[00:13:04] there is growth and there's development of the characters. And you also have to keep the plot fresh and ticking and you have to keep getting new things happening. Compare this with a film

[00:13:14] which has a fixed plot, a beginning, middle, a resolution and an end. How do you approach these two in terms of a creative person, your creative process? Because they're very different modes and they're very different formats. Yeah, I think to keep it simply, series are character driven

[00:13:36] and films are plot driven. Both are a little bit of both for sure. You can't say anything is exclusively one way or the other. But if you take a look at some of the most successful series

[00:13:51] in the world, whether it be from the OG, the Sopranos to Mad Men or even go out into Game of Thrones territory, you often find that these shows are even if you go into television and you

[00:14:08] take a look at friends or any kind of a sitcom, ultimately you as an audience, you become really attached to the characters regardless of what they're doing. And you want to see these characters grow

[00:14:20] and change and learn. And it almost doesn't matter what situation you put them in because you grow to love the characters so much. You just feel like you know them and you

[00:14:31] know how they'll react wherever you set them up. When it comes to films, you want to give a strong take home message or give people that kind of thrill experience or say whether it be

[00:14:53] a heist or whether it be something else, you really want to have the more active plot. It's not like a slow burn, you want to have an active plot. You want your audience to be highly

[00:15:06] engaged for a short period of time and they don't have distractions in the middle of that ideally apart from a bit of popcorn or somebody sitting in front of them on their phone.

[00:15:18] So the level of engagement is extremely high with films but it can only be sustained for a shorter period of time whereas for a series you might binge eight hours in a weekend

[00:15:30] but take frequent breaks and whatnot. So you can have a bit more of a casual viewing experience with a series than you can with a film. And I think that now after COVID people are definitely

[00:15:42] finding that the films which are, I mean you have films which you will watch in OTT, you'll not bother stepping out of your house for it because you know that

[00:15:51] it is going to be a one and a half hour or two hour experience that you will be there for. When it's done you can go to bed, you can stop thinking about it the next day, you move on to something else

[00:16:01] and then you have the theatrical film experience which is something where you don't want to miss it in theaters because visually, sound wise, it's going to be such a great thing to see the shot taking is going to be done differently. You will want to make sure you

[00:16:19] watch it. Like any Christopher Nolan film for example, you don't wait for it to come out on OTT, you definitely want to watch it in the movie theater otherwise it's just never going to be the same.

[00:16:31] Wonderful, wonderful example. What do you say that's a Badi Pa house style that you'll have? I think in terms of the work which people have seen what's released we definitely love to play in humor and dramedy. I think we definitely love to play with

[00:16:58] light social commentary with a note of humor. That's something that comes very easily I think in terms of Saaring An Anusha and I, we all really appreciate that type of comedy, light-hearted

[00:17:11] but with some sort of, excuse me, light-hearted but with some sort of depth to it. We also love like really sarcastic dry dark humor but that is something which doesn't play very well in India

[00:17:29] very often. In Pune it can play pretty well sometimes. So some of our shows like Casting Couch or Appalabapachi these are two more sarcastic darker shows where you know we're really playing on the lines but commercially there are things which you know say OTT platforms are

[00:17:46] a little more scared to invest in. They don't want to offend anyone or have cases brought against them or something so generally people anything which has the slight risk of being offensive tends to stay away from that. But very frankly as storytellers, as creators the three of us

[00:18:05] all really have a wide range of things that we love to consume or types of shows we would love to create. There's so many stories we'd love to tell but it's really you know what comes easy to us

[00:18:19] is definitely the the the the dramedy and the the comedy. Yeah, the comedy and the comedy. How talking of comedy you'll have now ventured into stand-up, Marathi stand-up and not only

[00:18:32] are you taking it to the US, you're also taking it to small town India. So talking about this disparity these two very different markets that you're leveraging what made you think of doing this?

[00:18:45] So the initial thought to do Marathi stand-up comedy came from our chartered accountant Aditya Desai. Interesting waste for stand up to come from. Yeah so Aditya was apart from being our CA was practicing stand-up comedy doing a lot of open mics in English.

[00:19:08] He's a Bandra boy Marathi guy but very comfortable in English and Hindi and he came to us we were doing our one year anniversary party and for Bhairi Pa we always love to do a

[00:19:20] live show for our anniversaries and it was our first time we did a live episode of Casting Couch with Amaya Nippun and Mithila Palakar where we had some music, we had some comedy show and

[00:19:34] Aditya came and said can I try doing some of my material in Marathi for your party? And we were a little wary honestly we said we don't know first of all we didn't know if he

[00:19:48] was going to be good in Marathi or not. So what we did is we we called him over and we said we're going to do a surprise show for some of our friends at our house. We're just going to call

[00:19:57] them in cold they won't know what's going to happen and you just start performing for them and they laughed a lot they really enjoyed it so he performed at the show and even that show

[00:20:07] went down very well. I think Maharashtra have a very easy setup for stand-up comedy it made a lot of sense because one of the most you know one of the literary giants of Maharashtra is

[00:20:23] and also all of the politicians who are fairly popular also have a very good sense of humor. So in terms of the political discourse comedy has always played a very strong role and when they're standing

[00:20:36] on the podium I guess you could call it stand-up comedy in many ways so so Marathi people were a very ready audience in terms of being ready to accept someone standing and telling jokes.

[00:20:49] There is a lot of misconceptions at first people thought that it might be like mimicry or sketch comedy which would be you know what you would see on a couple of times you know like the

[00:20:59] acting out sketches. So getting people to understand that this Marathi stand-up comedy is like one person with a mic telling jokes and you're supposed to laugh and respond. That is something that took a little time for people to catch on to especially the family audiences. When you

[00:21:17] were working with the Mumbai and Pune audiences who were anyway kind of accustomed to the English and Hindi stand-up comedy scene that was flourishing at the time this was in 2018. There was no problem people were just happy to see comics performing in Marathi and we had

[00:21:38] for the first batch of comics that we were working with we just recruited from word of mouth all of the Marathi guys who were doing it in Hindi and English and said come we're going to

[00:21:47] do jammies we're going to help each other adapt your material to Marathi and find ways that we can you know help these jokes land maybe even better in Marathi than they were in Hindi and English

[00:21:59] because ultimately if you're thinking in Marathi your comedy is going to travel and be accepted better in Marathi. So that was the initial thought and for a couple of years we were doing

[00:22:20] a lot of open mics we were doing stuff in Maharashtra we had just before Covid we'd had a couple of really cool projects happen. We did our first Australia tour which was a live tour of Casting

[00:22:35] Couch with Amai Nipun and Satting was doing Marathi stand-up comedy as an opening act and so Satting actually got into stand-up comedy through a play he was acting in called Stand Up which was the English Hindi play by Aikir various productions. Satting was playing a role of the

[00:22:56] regional stand-up comedian the guy who did it in Hindi and all the actors wrote their own sets or you know took some help but mainly tried to make their sets their own for that play

[00:23:08] and what Satting felt was that at the end of the day his stand-up is something that he really wanted to actually go out and try performing in Marathi as well and so parallelly to starting Marathi stand-up he also started performing the Australia tour was surprisingly extremely

[00:23:25] well receiving of it because typically when the Marathi live performances go abroad there's been a long history of Marathi Natuk. So we had people from all kinds of backgrounds as a documentary on our YouTube channel about it called Gyuntak and we had in total 14 stand-up comedians come out

[00:23:46] of that program and we took them on a road show across Maharashtra they came up with such incredible material some of them there was a couple of farmers, Adivasi tribal people, sex workers, trans people and people from the LGBT community they all were

[00:24:10] using stand-up comedy as a tool to basically communicate their life and their lived experiences to the audience but using humor so that it's done in a way that it's relatable and not in a way of

[00:24:26] asking for charity or oh look at all the problems I have using humor to relate on a human level and giving them that agency and power on stage and plus because Marathi stand-up I mean any

[00:24:37] stand-up comedy just requires a microphone or a loud voice you don't need equipment you don't need a big setup to do it it's something which you can kind of just take anywhere in the world

[00:24:48] with you. It was a really cool program and we just finished that program right before COVID came up so when we came out of COVID it's taken a while for the stand-up comedy to pick up

[00:25:00] again but last year we did a 15 city tour in the US, Sarin did after that he did a 7 city tour in Maharashtra and things have been going really well yeah that's wonderful now one of the

[00:25:13] things about you is that you're also an actor tell us a bit about that space in your life and the more famous project I would say is Sonia Gandhi's role which was really her role but

[00:25:27] it got the mileage so strangely yeah that was very funny so how did acting happen for somebody who studied film and how has it been what have been the interesting things that still stay with you

[00:25:42] and what would you like to do as a performer if you're looking at performing? So for me acting was something that until I was in my last year of film school I never

[00:25:56] even considered getting into. I had a lot of insecurities and public speaking was one of the really big ones also you know not having body confidence and things like that it was quite an introvert which I've trained myself to become more socially interactive now

[00:26:18] so acting was just not on my list of things I wanted to do and then I was in my last year filmmaking and we had done a directing workshop where it was about directing actors and we all

[00:26:29] had to direct each other and so as a director suddenly you're finding yourself in the position your actors are supposed to be in which I think all directors should do but I think

[00:26:38] a lot of them don't but for a director to be in that position and trying to understand as an actor what is your director really trying to tell you and finding the language to communicate

[00:26:50] with each other I had the opportunity to act and I had so much fun going into that process of finding subtext and dialogues finding ways to make a scene change through you know even

[00:27:05] just subtle body language and being in the moment and playing off of a co-actor it was something I didn't realize I could have so much joy in experiencing so it's a really fun very rewarding craft and

[00:27:21] yet I am such a control freak I could never find myself fully surrendering you know to the process or to the directors I was working with so what I found is you know when I came to India

[00:27:34] there was of course so many inquiries for me to act there was still even now a very limited pool of non-Indian actors who are available and here on you know good visas that they can work on which

[00:27:50] and I hate to say it but like you know there's a lot of say Eastern Europeans and Russians who are also having a harder time with English language and even that is something which makes it

[00:28:02] easier for somebody like me to jump in and do some acting work I don't know honestly if I I wouldn't even say I'm a good actor for sure but I enjoy acting and when I've had the opportunities

[00:28:18] I definitely struggled particularly because a lot of the acting I've done was in Hindi and Hindi is a language which I never even tried learning that seriously the way I've put my attention

[00:28:32] into Marathi Hindi and Marathi both kept on getting crossed in my head so I put Hindi on hold us all focus on Marathi instead and so being in a position when you have to memorize your dialogues

[00:28:46] figure out what they mean and perform it as if you know exactly what you're saying is it is something which kind of takes you a step back from being in that moment so you take a lot

[00:28:58] and a lot of time to mug up and prepare that was something which you know took a lot of the fun out of it so for me a lot of the fun roles I've done is where I either had ample time to prepare

[00:29:13] like my first lead role in a Marathi film was for a film called Pindadan where I had three months to learn all my dialogues and memorize learn the Marathi enough that I could even read it on the

[00:29:26] page so I had done all of this preparation which was really fun for me and I showed up on set and they changed all the scenes oh lord so that suddenly just for me I mean it was a really

[00:29:39] rewarding experience of course it keeps you on your toes you never know what you're going to walk in on to the set and experience and the role of Sonia Gandhi is one which was very easy for me

[00:29:51] because I didn't have a single dialogue but basically Ravi Tadav's team had called and said that you know Ravi is doing this film Me Atal Hoon and I said great I'm up for it and they were like

[00:30:07] okay rule the role because I love Ravi Ravi is a good friend and somebody who I always wanted to work with and so they said it's Sonia Gandhi and I was like that I'm definitely doing it and

[00:30:18] they're like but it's just a day you know there's no dialogues I said that's fine I don't care please count me in I think it was like an audition for the biopic maybe one day

[00:30:30] family lives to God's ears yeah but the so the acting is something I really enjoy it's very fun to step into a character's shoes I definitely have struggled with it being in a different language for the most part would I like to do more of it definitely but

[00:30:48] what I keep telling casting directors is that you know it's not on my priority list you know I am trying to you know build up party pub you know do my own writing and directing and producing so

[00:30:57] that's for me being a control freak behind the camera that's always something which I feel really excited about and acting is something which is a great fun thing to do on the side

[00:31:07] on the side yeah so tell us about the projects you have coming up there's something you just spoke about which was a comparative of your child your teen years and the teen years of the

[00:31:19] children that you see now in India today yeah yeah so there's there's a show which I'm developing it's called Dambis and Dambis is a word which is sort of a bastardization of the word

[00:31:37] damn beast in English and it was sort of used by you know British Colonials would call you know Indians running around damn beast and dam rat and over the years you know a grandma in Marathi

[00:31:52] would now affectionately call her child who's misbehaving Dambis and Damarat and not really even knowing that that where the origin of that is from and this got me thinking I loved the

[00:32:03] idea of around this word and it started me thinking about my rebellious years when I was being a damn beast and I had a very rebellious teenage hood you could say and one of the funniest things that

[00:32:23] you know I'd often tell people you know I'd stopped drinking by the time I was old enough to go to bars because I'd been there done that you know it didn't I was never really excited about clubbing

[00:32:33] because I'd already done it when I was 16 and all those things and so um I had a very uh wonderful and supporting relationship with my family which ultimately at the end of the day

[00:32:46] is what kept me out of any real serious trouble and as I would you know especially in India I would meet my friends Sodran of course he's 40 years old and when I would tell him about you know

[00:32:57] what age did you have your first drink or you know what age did you first have sex these kinds of questions would come up and um the answer you know would be you know at least a decade apart

[00:33:10] in terms of when I had gone and done these things and when he had done these things and so it was always a big stretch for him to you know understand you know what it is like as

[00:33:22] a young woman to kind of be in a world where you're experiencing all of these new experiences and kind of grasping and trying to find your identity in this big hot mess of a world and um

[00:33:38] and as we were doing research for other projects I come to realize that nowadays a lot of 15 16 year olds are having those experiences in India that I'd had when I was a teenager and I thought

[00:33:53] this is a really interesting opportunity for me to bring what I've learned now as a 34 year old woman who is you know a feminist and has gone through all of these stupid things put myself

[00:34:06] in ridiculously dangerous situations and somehow made it out on the other side what can I take from those experiences and give to a younger generation who could really use some tools and ways of thinking

[00:34:22] about these things and you know productive and constructive ways of problem solving that you know don't involve you know taking your own life or running away from your family or doing something really risky um so that is what Bambis is about ultimately it's it's a teen drama and

[00:34:45] it's something that I think it's hopefully gonna be coming out at some point do you see this as a series or a movie I see it as a series right now okay we'll see when it's ready um even I'm not

[00:35:01] totally sure about the language even it I think we'll set it up in Marathi but given the way that even teenagers talk nowadays you might be multilingual so we're gonna go and see as we go wonderful

[00:35:16] looking forward to that Paula and all the work you do all the very best for Bahadipa for the stand-up shows for everything and thank you so much for taking them out to this thanks for having me Kiran it's it's been lovely thanks for the chat